re: Last Week Tonight With John Oliver hammered the NCAA

quote:

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it's hilarious that one example was a kid who got a discount for a ballroom for his 21st birthday party

who on here had enough money to fund a 21st birthday party so large that it required a ball room?

i've said for going on 10 years now they should ease up the endorsement restrictions, because that is the ONLY way you can deal with this issue without killing all the minor sports. almost every athletic department already loses money, and once you pay males, you have to pay females due to title 9. that is going to destroy tons of sports because it just isn't financially viable.

you can cherry pick a few SJWs and disgruntled former players to talk about how horrible things are. however in these segments, you never see people on swimming scholarships get to talk about how thankful they are to get an educational opportunity. you start paying players and they're done.

or you can create a "super conference" where players can be paid...which would destroy sports in the other conferences because the march madness money would go to the super conference (with maybe a little dribbling down to the small conferences).

these segments/stories are pretty much always ignorant to how CFB works, too. they don't differentiate between what the university pays and what private donar organizations (like LSU's TAF).

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Bingo.

To me, there are 2 real options outside of the above, which I think is probably the best:

1) Disassociate the NCAA from colleges completely. Colleges merely become sponsors and the teams, like clubs. Then, they can be run more like a business. You have to destroy the scholarship model for this though. But I'm ok with that. If it isn't about college then so be it.

2) If you don't want to do that, then every athlete gets a wage slightly above minimum wage. They are already getting often $30,000 - $70,000 on average in scholarship money when you throw in room and board, books, etc. Technically, they are already getting paid. But yes, this is their job, throw in a median wage for everyone according to city Cost of Living and you're good.

If you do anything outside of those two things, or the above, you'll be killing college athletics as a whole. Every sport, particularly in CBB and CFB, would become far less competitive. It might fix those pesky BCS problems because we'd never have to worry about a Boise State again.